Sean Carroll recently tweeted this:
I could ‘t help giving him a straight answer. I actually like Sean Carroll, but I hate how he and others – think of John Gribbins, for example – self-appoint themselves as the only ‘gurus’ who are entitled to say something about grand theories or other ‘big ideas’: everyone else (read: all non-believers in QFT) are casually dismissed as ‘crackpot scientists’.
In fact, a few weeks before he had sent out a tweet promoting his ideas on the next ‘big ideas’, so I couldn’t help reminding him of the tweet above. 🙂
This is funny, and then it isn’t. The facts are this:
- The ‘new physics’ – the quantum revolution – started almost 100 years ago but doesn’t answer many fundamental questions (simply think about explaining spin and other intrinsic properties of matter-particles here).
- Geniuses like Einstein, Lorentz, Dirac and even Bell had serious doubts about the approach.
- Historical research shows theories and scientists were severely biased: see Dr. Consa’s review of quantum field theory in this regard.
I am very sorry, Dr. Carroll. You are much smarter than most – and surely much smarter than me – but here you show you are also plain arrogant. 
It’s this arrogance that has prevented a creative way out of the mess that fundamental physics finds itself in today. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging !
Reading Feynman 
He’s definitely extremely arrogant which is annoying because he’s a good communicator of complex ideas. He had Tim Maudlin on his podcast and kept it short because Maudlin says things Carroll doesn’t agree with. Then he will get on the other day and talked for 4 hours about how he’s effectively an establishment scientist safeguarding scientists against crackpots.
Thanks for your comment. I agree. I am still not quite sure what makes gurus like Carroll or Hossenfelder (‘How Beauty Leads Physics Astray’) or Lee Smolin (‘Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution’) talk gibberish – basically repeating the same mantra again and again: the Standard Model does not work but “quantum mechanics maintains its perilous but still correct existence.” [The latter quote is from Feynman’s introduction to his Lectures on QM.] It all does work when we’d all go back to de Broglie’s original equation for the matter-wave, and interpret the frequency as an orbital frequency rather than a linear one (see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341269271_De_Broglie's_matter-wave_concept_and_issues, which is a paper that explains half of my RG score). I recently re-sent what is probably my last paper on the proton radius (an elegant and easy quantum-mechanically and relativistically correct model) to Dr. Gasparian (PRad project) and Dr. Pohl (the genius behind the 2018-2019 revision of SI units). It answers all of their initial concerns – which they expressed in a first short exchange on the issue – on the explanation being merely ‘numerological’. I am extremely happy to have a non-academic day job, because academic research has become that what drove a genius like Ehrenfest to suicide: “… der unendlicher Heisenberg-Born-Dirac-Schrödinger Wurstmachinen-Physik-Betrieb …”
As far as I can see, mainstream physics suffers from an extreme amount of ‘group’ or ‘consensus’ thinking and – unfortunately – the award of Nobel Prizes to ‘mainstreamers’ only has set a standard now. The good thing about this is that a lot of people do start thinking for themselves now on ‘open science’ fora such as ResearchGate now. Phil Gibbs’ alternative viXra.org site is no longer needed, perhaps. 🙂